SOUTH DOS PALOS (MERCED COUNTY) — “Don’t press it too hard. It’s like a pillow. Firm outside but fluffy inside,” says Sonoko Sakai, cupping the onigiri in one hand while angling the other to mold the rice snack into its triangular shape.

“You don’t want to squish the grains, or it will get kind of mushy.”

A cooking teacher based in Los Angeles, Sakai is visiting her friend Robin Koda at Koda Farms in the Central Valley, which is known for breeding and producing Kokuho Rose, a premium Japanese-style heirloom rice. While Sakai, who spent her formative years in Japan, learned the art of onigiri at her grandmother’s knee, Koda is a sansei — a third-generation Japanese American — who did not. Hence the lesson in the farmhouse kitchen.

“I’m not the chef,” says Koda, giggling as she produces a less-than-perfect onigiri, her long, wavy hair gathered in a trademark loose bun.

The two met just three years ago, but it seems like they’ve known each other forever, in large part because their shared family history goes back at least three generations to the same rice-farming village in Japan. A century later, both women’s work revolves around rice — a crop, Sakai says, that is central to their culture.

The farmer and the chef: How rice was woven into two...

1of6Salmon Dill Onigiri at Koda Farms in South Dos Palos, California.Photo: Craig Lee, Special to The Chronicle

2of6Sonoko Sakai and Robin Koda make onigiri at Koda Farms in South Dos Palos (Merced County).Photo: Craig Lee, Special to The Chronicle

3of6Robin Koda makes onigiri at her family’s Koda Farms in South Dos Palos in Merced County.Photo: Craig Lee, Special to The Chronicle

4of6Salmon Dill Onigiri with Brown Rice at Koda Farms in South Dos Palos, California.Photo: Craig Lee, Special to The Chronicle

5of6Sonoko Sakai making Onigiri at Koda Farms.Photo: Craig Lee, Special to The Chronicle

6of6Koda Farms rice paddies in South Dos Palos (Merced County).Photo: Craig Lee, Special to The Chronicle

Their story goes like this: In 1908, Koda’s grandfather and Sakai’s great-uncle both left their home village of Ogawa on the same boat to the United States. Sakai’s ancestor quickly returned to Japan, unable to stomach the immigrant experience, according to Sakai.

But Koda’s grandfather, Keisaburo, stayed in California, building a business so successful that he eventually became known on both sides of the Pacific as the Rice King, even while his family endured internment during World War II.

When he first arrived in the United States as a former school principal, Keisaburo worked odd jobs throughout California before founding the rice farm. As a farmhand at a fruit orchard in Sacramento, he asked if he could collect the fallen fruit that was normally wasted and sell it in his spare time. Later, he wildcatted for oil near Coalinga (Fresno County), ran a tuna canning company in San Pedro near Los Angeles, and had a chain of Laundromats.

No matter your background, rice is likely an indelible part of your childhood food memories, and a constant part of your present day. In California, innumerable people depend on rice. Read some of those people's stories — and their recipes.

“The kind of laundry that would come in was prostitutes’ dirty laundry,” Sakai claims.

The California Alien Land Law of 1913, put in place to prevent Chinese, Japanese and other Asian immigrants from owning or leasing agricultural land, prevented Keisaburo from settling down until the 1920s. That’s when he bought the land — under his American-born sons’ names — that would become Koda Farms.

South Dos Palos is removed from the Sacramento Valley’s prime rice-growing country; it was the only land Keisaburo could get. But it had the same clay soil as farms further north, and as the son of a rice miller and broker back in Japan — who was a samurai to boot — Keisaburo became successful quickly. He was one of the first rice farmers to employ aerial rice planting.

Sonoko Saka (right)) and Robin Koda (left) walking along the rice paddies at Koda Farms in South Dos Palos, California, on Monday June 13, 2016 Sonoko Sakai and Robin Koda�s shared family history goes back three generations to the same Japanese rice growing village.

Photo: Craig Lee, Special to The Chronicle

“In Japan you plant by hand,” says Sakai, who has studied articles published about Keisaburo in Japan. “Flying around and spraying the seed — that was unthinkable in Japan; that was so American. How could you grow rice like that? Those were the modern methods that he figured out, because he needed to adapt to the farm.”

Things changed dramatically in 1941 when Japan entered World War II. Keisaburo, his wife and sons — William was a recent UC Davis graduate, Edward a UC Berkeley student — were sent to an internment camp in Colorado. The government forced him to sign over power of attorney to a lawyer he didn’t know for his land, home, equipment and airplanes. The lawyer sold almost everything to their neighbors in a fire sale.

“When my father came back, literally, neighbors wouldn’t talk to him,” says Koda about Edward, who had been the high school quarterback. Many of their descendants are still neighbors. “To this day none of them have ever said, ‘We feel bad that we bought your land for 10 cents on the dollar.’”

Yet the Kodas started over, and in the 1950s they hired a prominent breeder who helped them develop the rice they now call Heirloom Kokuho Rose.

California’s rice farms, originally founded to feed Chinese laborers, specialize in medium-grain rice and sticky rice, as well as short-grain, the kind popular in Japan. Kokuho Rose is a medium-grain cross of the starchy Japonica short-grain with an aromatic Middle Eastern strain. Koda says those qualities make it superior to Calrose, California’s standard medium-grain crop.

“It’s more fragrant and has a better cooking quality, a tender kernel when it’s cooked up,” she says.

Kokuho Rose also has a much smaller yield than less-expensive varieties, but the quality is appreciated by a core group of customers who visit the farm during the fall harvest, loading up on what’s called shin mai, or new rice. Still, the subtlety is often lost on a wider audience.

“It’s still that battle to educate people that there are great strains of rice that are good to eat on their own. Not as a gravy conveyor,” says Koda, who heads up marketing for the farm while her brother, Ross, runs it.

It wasn’t long after Koda Farms introduced Kokuho Rose that Sakai’s connection to the Kodas really took root. Sakai’s father, who worked for Japan Airlines, was assigned to work at San Francisco International Airport in the early 1960s.

There, Sakai’s father often saw Keisaburo, who would drive to the airport — always in his shiny yellow Cadillac — to pick up Japanese agriculture students who came to learn about his modern farming methods. Sakai’s parents often had dinner with Keisaburo and his wife at their San Francisco apartment.

“My mother would bring their rice back to relatives in Japan as a souvenir,” Sakai remembers. As Japanese expatriates in California, the Sakai family found the Kodas’ rice invaluable. “We just loved that we found rice grown by a Japanese family. It made us feel at home.”

Sakai is using Kokuho Rose to make the onigiri at Koda’s house, of course, even though it’s a medium-grain, rather than the stickier short-grain she usually uses.

Sonoko Sakai and Robin Koda making Onigiri at Koda Farms in South Dos Palos, California.

Photo: Craig Lee, Special to The Chronicle

“Onigiri means molding it with your hands,” says Sakai, who explains that mothers traditionally make them for their children. “Every mother’s touch is different.”

Sometimes you fold an ingredient into the rice before molding, such as in a salmon and dill onigiri (see recipe); other times you can stuff a small amount of filling into the middle. A sprinkle of furikake (a seasoning mix) and a strip of nori seaweed go on last. In Sakai’s new book, “Rice Craft,” she shows how to decorate them like human faces and cute animals.

“Let’s put in our soul to the onigiri. Because we are full of love,” says Sakai with a hint of drama, as if knowing how Koda will react.

“Don’t make me barf,” Koda replies, happy to play the role of droll farmer to Sakai’s earnest teacher persona.

Onigiri usually aren’t heavily seasoned, Sakai says, because Japanese diners are so attuned to the flavor and texture of their rice. But Sakai’s audience is Americans, who might want more flavor, so extra salt is optional.

“American people like salt, and Japanese onigiri are very bland,” explains Sakai.

“Don’t say bland, say subtle!” says Koda.

While not related — though they joke that they probably have shared DNA because their ancestral village is so tiny — their banter makes you think of the twins in “The Parent Trap,” separated as babies and raised in opposite worlds. Koda grew up in this one-horse California town, while Sakai’s father’s work took her family to Tokyo, New York, Mexico City, Los Angeles and San Francisco. And while Sakai is bilingual, Koda didn’t learn Japanese growing up.

Sonoko Sakai (right) and Robin Koda (left) by the rice paddies at Koda Farms in South Dos Palos (Merced County).

Photo: Craig Lee, Special to The Chronicle

The difference in their backgrounds became clear the first time they met at a pop-up dinner Sakai cooked at Bar Tartine in San Francisco.

“She looked so rock ’n’ roll,” Sakai says of Koda. “She had the wild hair and the leather jacket. I thought, ‘Wow, she’s so American,’ adds Sakai, who is more prone to Peter Pan collars and pixie haircuts. “But deep down in her roots, she is Japanese. Her soul is Japanese.”

Not one to get sentimental, Koda seems to beam inwardly. “Sonoko and I get along just because of our temperaments,” she says. “There aren’t too many Japanese women who are outspoken.”

When Sakai teaches people how to make onigiri, she calls on her own experience living near rice fields in the Japanese city of Kamakura, when she and her siblings lived at her grandmother’s house. They walked by the rice mill every day, and during harvest the farmer’s wife delivered the new rice from a basket on her back. Then Sakai’s grandmother cooked the rice on a wood stove.

A fourth-generation Northern Californian, Tara Duggan has written about food for The San Francisco Chronicle since 1999, starting out as a culinary intern in the Food & Wine department’s test kitchen. She currently covers the restaurant and food industry, seafood, sustainable agriculture and food policy, all with a Bay Area focus. A graduate of the California Culinary Academy, Tara also wrote The Working Cook recipe column, which appeared in The Chronicle for 11 years. She authored a cookbook based on the column in 2006 and has since written three other cookbooks, including “Root to Stalk Cooking” and “The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee.” Her writing and recipes have also appeared in the New York Times, Sunset and Food & Wine Magazine.